Good Reasons Or Bad Conscience? Or Why Some Indian Peoples of Amazonia Are Ambivalent About Eating Meat

Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America ISSN: 2572-3626 (online) Volume 16 Issue 2 Cosmology and Practice in Amazonia Article 7 12-15-2019 Good Reasons or Bad Conscience? Or Why Some Indian Peoples of Amazonia Are Ambivalent about Eating Meat Stephen P. Hugh-Jones University of Cambridge, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.trinity.edu/tipiti Part of the Archaeological Anthropology Commons, Civic and Community Engagement Commons, Family, Life Course, and Society Commons, Folklore Commons, Gender and Sexuality Commons, Human Geography Commons, Inequality and Stratification Commons, Latin American Studies Commons, Linguistic Anthropology Commons, Nature and Society Relations Commons, Public Policy Commons, Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons, and the Work, Economy and Organizations Commons Recommended Citation Hugh-Jones, Stephen P. (2019). "Good Reasons or Bad Conscience? Or Why Some Indian Peoples of Amazonia Are Ambivalent about Eating Meat," Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America: Vol. 16: Iss. 2, Article 7, 102-119. Available at: https://digitalcommons.trinity.edu/tipiti/vol16/iss2/7 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Digital Commons @ Trinity. It has been accepted for inclusion in Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America by an authorized editor of Digital Commons @ Trinity. For more information, please contact [email protected]. ARTICLE Good Reasons or Bad Conscience? Or Why Some Indian Peoples of Amazonia Are Ambivalent about Eating Meat Stephen Hugh-Jones University of Cambridge UNITED KINGDOM When they first visited Amazonia, our small children were horrified to see people killing mon- keys and macaws to eat.1 Viewing the killing of any animal was bad enough, but this was even worse. These particular ones could not possibly be food; they were the sacred inhabitants of a fantasy world of picture books, zoos, and far-away jungles now fast becoming very real. To add insult to injury, their parents were not only prepared to eat such animals themselves but also expected their children to do so too. At first, they refused outright but as they became hungrier, refusal gave way to grudging acceptance, first of a few tentative nibbles and then of whole mouthfuls. If they never became entirely reconciled to the traumas of this exotic diet, it certainly had its compensations: a baby marmoset, orphaned in the chase, became a treasured pet, and even the animals they were forced to eat came packaged with exotic beaks, teeth, fur, and feathers that could be stored away to show friends back home. Returning hunters, once condemned as murderers, were soon greeted with enthusiastic expectation. Faced with the stark realities that lie behind the consumption of meat, our children’s re- actions were symptomatic of the world from which they came. In Europe, meat (especially red meat) has a markedly ambiguous status. Europeans typically consider meat to be food par excellence, the focal dish of feasts, banquets, and family meals, and a sign of wealth, luxury, sociability, and well-being. It is also a sign and source of strength—it comes from large, strong animals, it has masculine connotations, it is the diet of preference for those who rely on physical strength, and it is held to make them yet stronger. However, if meat makes one strong, one also requires a certain kind of strength to eat meat. Red meat is powerful stuff that both body and mind can sometimes find hard to take. On our plates and throughout our meals we balance the strength of meat by pairing it with white, bland, soft, watery, or sweet foods of vegetable origin. These same foods also dominate the diets of invalids’ and children, who are considered as not strong enough to resist the strength of meat. Meat also demands strength of another kind, a strength of will in the face of knowing that in eating meat, one’s own enjoyment of life also presupposes the enjoyment of a life, the killing and destruction of another living being. Given this problem, one would predict considerable instability in attitudes and behavior associated with meat consumption: habits will change through time, there will be inconsisten- cies between thought and action, and contradictions between rival opinions as to what is right and wrong. This is precisely what the works of Keith Thomas (1983), Noelie Vialles (1987), and Nicholas Fiddes (1991) all demonstrate. For France, Vialles shows how abattoirs have been progressively displaced away from urban centers and subject to increasingly strict regu- lation, a cleansing of the activities that is at once both practical and symbolic. For England, Thomas and Fiddes document steadily declining meat consumption, a corresponding rise in vegetarianism, and increasingly intense public debates and changing legislation concerning the proper treatment of animals. These authors all seem to agree that this increase in sensitivity regarding the killing of animals for food, itself deeply implicated in our ideas about the nature of civilization, is corre- lated with the rise of modern, industrial society, with its spreading urbanization and marginal- ization of animals from production. Associated with these changes, there has been a redefini- tion of what animals are and of how we should relate to them: a move away from the idea of dominating creatures considered to be radically different from ourselves and toward one of stewardship of beings to whom we increasingly extend the rights and duties associated with personhood. In Thomas’s words, “There was a growing conflict between the new sensibilities and the material foundations of human society. A mixture of compromise and concealment Published by Digital Commons @ Trinity, 2019 102 Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America has so far prevented this conflict from having to be fully resolved. But the issue cannot be completely evaded and it can be relied upon to recur. It is one of the contradictions upon which modern civilisation may be said to rest. About its ultimate consequences we can only speculate” (1983:303). When I read Vialles’s study of abattoirs in southwest France, what struck me were the similarities between what she describes and what I and other colleagues have observed in Amazonia: a mixture of compromise and concealment with respect to the killing and eating of meat. However, in Amazonia we are dealing not with the end point of civilization but with societies that some historians might characterize as archaic and uncivilized. Are these modern sensibilities really so new, or have they been with us all along? I want to suggest that they have. In certain respects, Amerindian attitudes are really quite similar to those of modern Europeans, and they stem ultimately from two quite general exis- tential problems, of concern to most human beings, which are thrown into especially sharp relief by the killing of animals for meat. The first is a preoccupation with the fact that the line that divides people from animals is far from clear; the second is an awareness that the repro- duction and integration of human life depends upon the destruction and disintegration of other components of the world. I also want to suggest that efforts to systematize and ration- alize Amerindian beliefs and practices often obscure this common ground. This search for good or logical cultural reasoning behind apparently alien customs not only tends to exaggerate the cultural distance between Amerindians and ourselves but also gives the impression that their ideas are more homogenous and less subject to historical change than is actually the case. I shall base my discussion on the Barasana and Makuna, who are Tukanoan peoples of southeastern Colombia. Like my children, but for distinct reasons, the Tukanoans also make use of the derivative products of meat consumption as a way of coming to terms with some of the problems involved. However, I also want to use a wider comparative focus. It is best to see the Indians of Amazonia not as discrete tribes, each with their own peculiar customs and beliefs, but instead as a community of diverse people living in a common geographic area and sharing elements of a common cultural heritage. In Amazonia, as in Europe, we find a range of attitudes toward the eating of meat that vary not just between different ethnic groups but also between different individuals and between different historical periods. Some Amazonian Attitudes toward Meat Amazonian Indians have a proverbial passion and hunger for meat. A meal with no meat is not considered a proper meal at all, and many Amerindian languages make a verbal distinction between ordinary hunger and a special hunger for meat.2 Apparently never available in ade- quate quantities, meat is esteemed above all other foods and is a favorite topic of conversation. Meat is also the focus of intense social interest as a highly charged object of exchange: men use gifts of meat to secure sexual favours from lovers or to underwrite their status as husbands and household heads; households share meat as a key expression of community ties; in-laws give each other meat as an expression of their reciprocal obligations whilst asymmetrical ex- changes of meat—from leader to followers, from son-in-law to father-in-law, from nomadic hunter to settled farmer—express asymmetries of status and power. Despite this enthusiasm for meat, Amazonian Indians also realize that one can have too much of a good thing. Eating meat, especially the meat of large animals, carries both moral and physical dangers and should be done in moderation. Amongst the Achuar, “an evident enthusiasm for eat eating … is played down in both speech and table manners” (Descola 1986:308, my trans.),3 whilst the Araweté say they ended their resistance to contact with White people because they “were tired of eating only meat” (Viveiros de Castro 1992:47).

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